County news: Baby killer jailed for life

A mother who confessed to murdering her baby son while she was in jail for killing her three-year-old daughter has been sentenced to life behind bars today (Friday, April 15).

Lesley Dunford, 37, maintained her innocence after being jailed for seven years for the manslaughter of three-year-old Lucy after she suffocated her.

But her husband Wayne stood by her believing she was a victim of a miscarriage of justice.

But while in prison she admitted pushing seven-month-old Harley’s face into his cot mattress when she couldn’t stop him crying at the family’s former home in Camber, East Sussex.

Today, Justice Jeremy Baker, sitting at the Old Bailey, sentenced her to life with a minimum term of 13 years after hearing that her soon to be ex-husband, forgives her.

He said: “The reality is had you not confessed to having killed Harley whilst in custody it’s highly likely there would not have been a police investigation into his death and you would not have faced prosecution for his murder.”

Dunford, wearing glasses and her hair tied in a pony tail, appeared emotionless as she was jailed and at times rocked back and forth in the dock as she heard the details of the murder.

The court heard, at 3.10pm on the day of Lucy’s death on February 2, 2004, six months after Harley’s death, she ran to her vicar Lucy Murdoch, who had been consoling her, and said ‘it’s happened again’.

Miss McAtasney said: “She was said by hospital staff to be behaving oddly and saying inappropriate things.

“No action was taken against her in response to the second child.”

Harley had been found dead in his cot on August 27, 2003, and a finding of death by staphylococcus pneumonia infection was initially wrongly recorded in the post-mortem.

But a post-mortem revealed Lucy died from asphyxia due to forced blockage of her airways.